The Written World and the Unwritten World: Essays


 
 
 Translator’s Acknowledgments
 I would like to thank, first of all, Giovanna Calvino for giving me the opportunity to work on The Written World and the Unwritten World, which has been an education not only in language but in life. I would also like to thank my editors, Pilar Garcia-Brown and Jessica Vestuto, for their stalwart patience. Finally, I would like to thank Enrica Maria Ferrara, professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin, whose close readings and knowledge of Calvino’s works were invaluable.
 
 
 Reading, Writing, Translating
 
 
 Good Intentions
 The Good Reader looks forward impatiently to his vacation. He has saved a certain amount of reading that interests him for the solitary weeks he’ll spend at the beach or in the mountains, and he can already taste the joy of siestas in the shade, the rustling of pages, surrender to the fascination of other worlds exuded by densely printed pages.
 As the holidays approach, the Good Reader tours the bookshops, browses, sniffs, has second thoughts, returns the next day to buy; at home he takes down from the shelf volumes whose pages are still uncut and lines them up between the bookends on his desk.
 It’s the time when the mountain climber dreams of the peak he’s getting ready to scale, and 
 Characters and Names
 In my opinion the names of characters are very important. When I’m writing and about to introduce a new character, and I already have a clear idea of what this character is like, I stop to search, even for half an hour at a time, and I can’t go on until I’ve found a name that is the true name, the only name for that character.
 A history of literature (or at least of literary taste) could be written based on characters’ names. Limiting ourselves to contemporary Italian writers, we can distinguish two principal trends: names that have as little weight as possible, that don’t create any sort of barrier between the character and the reader, common, interchangeable baptismal names, like numbers